Friday, 14 December 2012

Play with your dog, for science

Wow. Very heavy stuff. I’m really happy you put this all out there. It's a great resource, especially when people tend to think, "That won't happen to me." An uncomfortable and upsetting situation hopefully becomes more real and understandable. Hopefully, an eye of caution will be extended to those circumstances more often associated with bites. Show us how you playYou’re right, my mind has been 100% on things not related to dog bites. At the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab, we just launched our next project. It’s called, Project: Play with Your Dog.We are cataloguing all the ways—traditional, original, or creative—people play with their dogs. To do this, we are using the Citizen Science platform and asking dog owners to submit short videos of themselves playing with their dog. It's really just a happy study.

This week, we launched with a guest blog post on Scientific American, How do you play with your dog? and the project is now on their Citizen Science page.Now we need hundreds of videos ofpeople playing with their dogs!How people can participate: Find or make a 30-60 second video of you and your dog playing in whatever way you like to play together, and then upload the video to our website and complete a short survey. REALLY IMPORTANT: Both dog and person should be visible for all or most of the video. As cute as it is to see your dog running back and forth, we need to see youin the video playing with your dog.SUGGESTIONS:Attach the video camera to a tripod to capture the play area, or have another person hold the video camera.Then, everyone is invited to add a picture to our Wall of Contributors (which is growing and the pictures are really awesome!)Project: Play with Your Dog is open to anyone, in any country. If you live with a dog, we want to see you play.

Additional details:Subjects: Participants must be at least 8 years old Time Commitment: 20 to 30 minutesProject Duration: Ongoing through Spring 2013Project Website: www.DogHumanPlay.comContact: DogCognitionStudy@gmail.comThat's what's going on in my world. Look forward to seeing a video of Elke in the river and you with stick in hand ;)Happy holidays on the horizon!!!Julie